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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

You are trying, really trying, to describe something that is quite beyond description. Do you realize it? You certainly do, but you try to describe it anyway and make a complete shambles of the exercise. Oh well...

Morning skies in August come in shades intense and fetching, the early sunlight burnishing clouds into brilliance and lighting up contrails against skies that often as not have a touch of violet in them. Now and then, everything up there looks like stained glass. There are high fluffy
streaks from horizon to horizon, the gossamer strands of light touching everything with copper and oro pallido - the pale lustrous gold that only visits the world at the beginning of day (although I seem to remember that Tuscan skies sometimes held such fiery wonders in late afternoon when I was a student there many years ago). One thing is for sure - you need a large brush to paint such sweeping confetti colored expanses, or a wide angle lens that takes in all of the Old Wild
Mother's creation. Perhaps it's time to consider acquiring another lens for my camera and more tubes of scarlet, gold and indigo for my paint box.

Spencer and I went out to greet the morning together as usual, although I am supposed to stay indoors for a few more
days. Slipper clad, I sipped my tea (Earl Grey) thoughtfully, and my sweet companion looked up at the sky and around the garden with his tail oscillating back and forth like an exuberant metronome. As we stood out there in sleepy wonder, thousands of geese were flying up from their night's rest on the river and out into the corn to feed, vast waves of joyous honking as they passed overhead on the way to their breakfast buffets in the wide farm fields beyond the village.

August mornings have always been like this, we told each other as we eyed the clouds and watched the skies for incoming flights. This is the traditional music of August, "the music of what happens" 'round here as the season draws to a slow and honeyed close.

From the Work

Self Portrait With Moon and Clouds

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Other Moorings, Other Coves

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Wise Words

These pages, too, are nothing other than talking leaves—their insights stirred by the winds, their vitality reliant on periodic sunlight and on cool dark water seeping up from within the ground. Step into their shade. Listen close. Something other than the human mind is at play here.

David Abram, Becoming Animal

When we deliberately leave the safety of the shore of our lives, we surrender to a mystery beyond our intent.